Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Handwriting woes

I know there have been threads on this in the past, but my half-hearted search didn't bring up anything. My DS7, grade-skipped to 2nd, has horrible handwriting. We have been admittedly lax lately in getting him to practice, for various reasons, but I'm wondering if anyone has a method that has worked well before we dive into this again.

I just made DS7 rewrite a paragraph he wrote because he did not leave any spaces between the words. And as he was rewriting, he still had trouble remembering to do this. It was a horrible session, full of frustration (both of us) and erasing.

Help! I know that next year, they will be starting to learn cursive, and I was hoping that we could just hold off. We have issues here with a kid who doesn't like to take instruction from his parents. His writing has always been pretty bad, even when he was with age-mates. Any ideas?

Thanks

My son's school tells the kids to use a "finger space" between words in early grades. The teachers have the kids put a finger after one word and begin the next word after the finger. It's a simple method that seems to work well.

A Popsicle stick works great too.

Cursive has turned out to be so much easier for dd. She says it is faster because she doesn't have to pick us her pencil between letters. It does seems faster for her - I think her perception here helps her speed.

If his handwriting is really much worse than agemates, I would suggest getting him evaluated for dysgraphia or other problems that could be interfering with his ability to get words down on the page smoothly with appropriate spacing. The fact that he had difficulty managing to do this even with reminders is a red flag for me.

Hi SPG!
Buy the Handwriting without Tears Print book.
Then sit with him for 5 minutes each school day and both of you do it.
Let him make the smiley faces under the 3 best letters you made and you make the smiley face under the 3 best letters he made.

If you want to save on postage - order "The Print Tool" and analyse your own printing just to get used to using it. And if DS wanders past and wants to know what you are up to, and try using the funny clear sheets to analyse family members handwriting, and maybe even his own, that's all good.

I know it can be alarming to see a paragraph without spaces between the words, but my kid's brain can be a bit 'stickly' at times, and at that age he was convinced that one should use the whole page, and didn't want to hear otherwise about margins or any such thing. Even when I showed him the red line on notebook paper and asked him what it was for.

Remember that the work you do with him may not show any effect for a few years - but he may well be able to leap ahead overnight a year or two from now. (Or he may be dyslexic - hard to know)

In the meanwhile - work on core muscle strength, arm strength, hand strength, finger strength - clay and crochet and washing the dishes and mud forts and painting miniature figurines - all the normal stuff that our computer kids miss. And start laying a foundation for touchtyping!!!

Love and More Love,
Grinity

ditto everything Aculady and Grinity say. An evaluation will give you important information/understanding of what is creating the barrier. HWOT is a great program and one of the interventions that the evaluator most likely will recommend.

You are wise to be concerned - poor handwriting can cause havoc in many seemingly unrelated areas - note taking/study skills, math. Accommodations may help, but it is important that your child develop some fluency. Sometimes there is just no getting around handwriting.

Thanks everybody for your comments. It seems like earlier this year, when he really tried hard, he could write very neatly. So many other things in life come up, that I forgot to do the daily writing. We'll get back on it, and check out the HWWT book.

Is dysgraphia something that the folks at the public school might check for if I ask? Or is that an outside eval sort of thing generally?

Dysgraphia and related disorders are things that the public school is required to check for if you ask - when you make your written request, ask that he be evaluated to see if he has a "disorder of written expression". This is the term used in the federal statute requiring the school to evaluate.

We have used a couple of different things with variable success with our DD (who also loathed, or still does, that is-- handwriting).

Handwriting without Tears is very good, and lots of people like it, but our DD did not.

When she was very young, we used Draw*Write*Now with her, and she seemed more tolerant of the handwriting practice because of the paired drawing exercises.

Eventually, we moved over to Italic Handwriting (the Getty and Dubay series) with her at about sixth grade, when the school's "D'Nealean" just plain didn't stick with her after regular instruction ceased in fifth grade.

Honestly, I think that the handwriting was probably just a victim of asynchronous development in her case.

Her handwriting is finally getting better (she's 11) now that she is needing to take notes in her high school classes. I'm ultimately glad we didn't force the issue too much, but part of that is her personality. The harder we push, the more she pushes BACK, so it would have been a no-win situation in short order if we'd tried.

We just had her do a few minutes a couple times a week when her writing deteriorated to a point of illegibility.

I may have her try working through the Getty and Dubay series again now that she is seeing a need for greater SPEED in note-taking. She's quite pragmatic about things like this, however, so unless she sees the NEED, she's unlikely to comply with any particular intervention. I don't know if that applies to anyone else, but I figured I would mention that just in case.

I personally have never achieved handwriting skills at a grade 2 level. The school forced me to work at it until grade 6, when they finally gave up. Did not affect my academic work in any other area.

Although I think it is good to attempt to work on a given person's weakness, some weaknesses may never be overcome. I feel it is good to work on it until signs of no further progress is seen. At this point, leave it alone for a while and try again. Sometimes it is a matter of waiting until the time is right. Other times, it may be a specific disability and nothing can be done. Just don't assume a weakness in one academic skill is any indication of weakness in others. Allow the child to continue to build on the strengths they show.

Everyone including the most gifted have weaknesses. Some weaknesses are just not as obvious or as much of a concern to society.